Taldren Closure Interview

PC.IGN managed to get some details from the former CEO of Taldren - Erik Bethke who discloses some details about the studio's closure:

IGNPC: Like many, we were surprised to hear that Taldren was shut down so our first question is fairly obvious. Why exactly was Taldren closed?

Erik Bethke: The closure of Taldren-CA is a decision that we made over a long time -- going back perhaps 18 months now. We decided a long time ago that we would work energetically and actively to get off of the work-for-hire treadmill and create our own properties and seek to build our company towards having its own "story" or reason for existence. Various developers have broken out of the work-for-hire model through creating mega-hits or engines or other opportunities. We knew we could keep a developer going for years -- growing and shrinking as the projects come and go -- we worked at these companies ourselves -- but we wanted to create a company with real value or move on.

The exact reason is that after Majesco and Taldren stepped away from each other on Black9, Taldren-CA moved forward with a maintenance contract with another online game for another publisher and in this past month it has been decided that this game will probably no longer benefit from additional development work and that it will need to prove its viability on its own from here on out.

While this work was going on Sean Dumas was energetically pursuing a strategy of a set of small, web-downloadable games that we could offer directly and/or partner with others. We heard through the developer grapevine that a few others have had good success with this and have been able to use this to develop their own source of development funds for new games.

Zachary Drummond, Sean Dumas and Ken Yeast were also looking at some tactical opportunities for small work-for-hire projects but in the end none of them appeared to really forward the goals of the company but instead looked like just work at the cost of distraction.